Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been involved in artificial intelligence (AI) research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in computer architecture, and in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design.[1]
Sussman attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate and received his SB in mathematics in 1968. He continued his studies at MIT and obtained a PhD in 1973, also in mathematics, under the supervision of Seymour Papert. His doctoral thesis was titled "A Computational Model of Skill Acquisition" focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning, using a computational performance model named HACKER.[2]
According to a common story,[3] in 1966, Marvin Minsky tasked his student Gerald Jay Sussman to “spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw.”[4] This story was often told to illustrate that the difficulty of computer vision was not apparent to AI researchers in the early days.
Sussman's contributions to artificial intelligence include problem solving by debugging almost-right plans, propagation of constraints applied to electrical circuit analysis and synthesis, dependency-based explanation and dependency-based backtracking, and various language structures for expressing problem-solving strategies. Sussman and his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the programming language Scheme in 1975.
Sussman saw that artificial intelligence ideas can be applied to computer-aided design (CAD). Sussman developed, with his graduate students, sophisticated computer-aided design tools for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). Steele made the first Scheme chips in 1978. These ideas and the AI-based CAD technology to support them were further developed in the Scheme chips of 1979 and 1981. The technique and experience developed were then used to design other special-purpose computers. Sussman was the principal designer of the Digital Orrery, a machine designed to do high-precision integrations for orbital mechanics experiments. The Orrery hardware was designed and built by a few people in a few months, using AI-based simulation and compiling tools.[5]
Using the Digital Orrery, Sussman has worked with Jack Wisdom to discover numerical evidence for chaotic motions in the outer planets. The Digital Orrery machine is now retired at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Sussman was also the lead designer of the Supercomputer Toolkit, another multiprocessor computer optimized for evolving of ordinary differential equations. The Supercomputer Toolkit was used by Sussman and Wisdom to confirm and extend the discoveries made with the Digital Orrery to include the entire planetary system.[6][7]
Sussman has pioneered the use of computational descriptions to communicate methodological ideas in teaching subjects in Electrical Circuits and in Signals and Systems. Over the past decade Sussman and Wisdom have developed a subject that uses computational techniques to communicate a deeper understanding of advanced classical mechanics. In Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field, he writes "... computational algorithms are used to express the methods used in the analysis of dynamical phenomena. Expressing the methods in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous and computationally effective. Students are expected to read the programs and to extend them and to write new ones. The task of formulating a method as a computer-executable program and debugging that program is a powerful exercise in the learning process. Also, once formalized procedurally, a mathematical idea becomes a tool that can be used directly to compute results." Sussman and Wisdom, with Meinhard Mayer, have produced a textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, to capture these new ideas.
Sussman's work is presented in many videos, such as: with Hal Abelson in a full 20 lecture version of MIT's SICP course,[10] for LispNYC,[11][12] at the International Conference on Complex Systems,[13] for ArsDigita University,[14] and giving the keynote talk at a Strange Loop conference.[15][16]
In 2023 he received the IEEE Computer Society’s Taylor L. Booth Education Award for his “inspirational approach to the teaching of computer science through functional programming".[19]
Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman; "Revised Report on the Propagator Model", documentation and system, August 2010.
Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman; "The Art of the Propagator," MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-002; Abridged version in Proc. 2009 International Lisp Conference, March 2009.
"Cellular Gate Technology", Thomas F. Knight and Gerald Jay Sussman, Proc. UMC98, First International Conference on Unconventional Models of Computation, Auckland, NZ, January 1998.
"Sparse Representations for Fast, One-shot learning", Kenneth Yip and Gerald Jay Sussman, Proc. of National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 1997. A longer version appears as MIT AI Lab Memo #1633, May 1998
"Amorphous Computing", Harold Abelson, Don Allen, Daniel Coore, Chris Hanson, George Homsy, Thomas F. Knight, Jr., Radhika Nagpal, Erik Rauch, Gerald Jay Sussman, Ron Weiss, in Communications of the ACM, 43, 5, May 2000. Also as MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 1665, August 1999.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman, MIT Press and McGraw-Hill, 1985, second edition 1996, ISBN 0-262-01153-0. (published translations in French, Japanese, Polish, Chinese, Korean, and German).
^Applegate, James; Douglas, M.; Gursel, Y.; Hunter, P.; Seitz, C.; Sussman, Gerald Jay (September 1985). "A Digital Orrery". IEEE Transactions on Computers. C-34 (9): 822–831. doi:10.1109/TC.1985.1676638. S2CID10002156.
^Applegate, James; Douglas, M.; Gursel, Y.; Sussman, Gerald Jay; Wisdom, Jack (July 1986). "The Outer Solar System for 200 Million Years". Astronomical Journal. 92: 176–194. Bibcode:1986AJ.....92..176A. doi:10.1086/114149. hdl:1721.1/6442.
